​Sorry that my communications have gone cold lately. I do expect to change the frequency of my tune any day now. TOMORROW, Chapter Four of The Beard will be live. For now, enjoy the final release from Lunar Lemur's Punching Clouds. ​I haven't received any new music yet but I've been told to expect something in time to post next Monday. I'm as excited as you are to find out what form that'll take this time.

Yes, we're already taking our first skip week. It's hard to argue with vicious microbes just trying make their way in this extended cosplay we call existence. Influenza doesn't know that we need Ryan's energy to form magic out of my mind gutter sculptures so that we can all have a good laugh at ourselves; they just found a cozy place to set up shop. They've since been evicted from life (do viruses go to heaven, hell, purgatory or that weird husk world of Daniel Quinn's, I wonder?) and Ryan's hard at work so that we can bring you Chapter Two next week. In the meantime, check out the latest Lunar Lemur release "Cloud Toenails" (direct your eyeballs to the left of the screen) and have a gander at this very socially engaged pig:

August 15, 2016​

​The debut isn't formally out until Friday but the next Lunar Lemur song cycle is already underway.

My sparse Lemur-spotting excursions had been fruitless since the initial meeting and email contact had gone cold, so I wasn't sure if we'd be getting more. Then, just before I moved to Hamilton, I found a flash drive in my mailbox containing 8 new songs in a folder called "Punching Clouds - Lunar Lemur". Most of this material is much closer to an Eno-esque ambient album, but still bears identifiable marks of barely contained weirdness. I left a note at my old address for the Lemur, but if you are Lunar Lemur, or you've had a sighting, please get in touch with me via trinkettrancemusic AT gmail DOT com or @utopiacomplex on twitter.

Thanks for bearing with us on our Beard tardiness. Rearing children and needing those all-powerful survival tickets can gum up ambitious creative endeavours from time to time (imagine that). We're recalibrating our approach in order to bring you the story faster without destroying ourselves. All shall be revealed, including our overdue second chapter, this Friday.

Join us for an irreverent exploration of itchy id impulses, eroding social etiquette, well-meaning idiocy, insidious ego worship, the allure of exploratory artists and the search for purpose in a world bursting at its seams with redundancy.

The Beard is a multi-media digital comic presented as an enriched PDF document. This means that if you spend some time hunting and clicking around on the fantastic artwork by Ryan Stanley, you’ll find links to exclusive downloads or streams by bands and artists featured in the story, sound effects, reference pages and whatever else we think of as we figure this thing out in front of you.

Our plan is to release 5 (or 6)-page chapters bi-weekly until the first 26-page issue is complete, at which point we’ll collect the chapters as a single issue before figuring out a release schedule for the next installment.

APRIL 3, 2017

​Shit. Where did that month go? The remix is still in progress and we're reserializing the first issue to all the major webcomic platforms - Tapastic, Webtoon, Comic Fury, etc. The "final" version of issue one should be ready by the end of the month and we'll be diving right into issue two after that. Soon, the website will be undergoing major changes that'll make it a lot more streamlined and conducive to building a little pocket community on the internet for us weirdos.

You may have noticed that it's quite distinctly not a Friday, either due to the sort of depleted joy meter that comes with having most of a work week ahead of you or through some arcane ability to track the passage of time (I only know that it's after Sunday because the internet keeps almost telling me something I don't want to know about Hodor yet).

​Back to the point: Since this whole thing's a public work in progress, we're going to shake things up and see how Tuesdays work for weekly updates and monthly (for now) chapter drops.

We want to be a happy little nasty distraction to help you push through another week of doing stuff you don't really want to do so that you can afford to do what you need to do (and also buy a bunch of stuff you don't really need(shut up, Tyler's judgemental hypocrisy.)).

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​Enjoy. Or don't - it's really up to you - but wherever you fall on the Kinsey scale of affection for crusty absurdity, thanks for giving our experiment some of your precious temporal tickets. You're never getting any of them back, so spend them well. See you next week, we hope.

​We're in the home stretch now. There's only one more chapter to go in issue one (the first six issue story arc has already been written, in case I haven't mentioned).

For the most complete experience view with PDF-XChange Editor (you're in luck Windows 10 users). Adobe Reader 9 or later and an up to date Flash player should work but there's a fish in the percolator so...

Oops. We did it again. My fault this time. Another somewhat time-sensitive project put my attention in a Dothraki Death-Grip and I couldn't quite get my excrement together to get the lettering and embedded content done (I do all the word balloon business, for those curious about work load division). So let's say that The Beard comes out the first Friday of every month for now, so that when we pick up the pace it'll be a pleasant surprise. And, in the name of keeping you engaged, this image might possibly be as important to The Beard as the polar bear was to Lost.

​I hope you've exercised more self control than I have. If you're not too busy crying the nougat out of your beard, cleavage, or both, take a listen to the latest Lunar Lemur track and give Ryan's spooky Drawloween renderings a gander. And if you need a viewing recommendation, I'm reviving and expanding my Best Horror Movies of All Time list in the new Recommendations section of the website. It's just raw data right now but I'll be adding brief commentary as time/interest dictates.

As usual, that took longer than planned. I'm over the major life hurdle of moving to a new home in a new city now though, so regular updates on this page should resume next week along with a new feature to keep things interesting between formal content updates.

This chapter contains 6 hidden meta data components. Pretend they're Pokémon and get hunting. In particular, you'll want to find the special advanced link to an upcoming Eat Electricity track (the multi-talented Geoff Bennett you should remember from The Mark Inside.)

Fearing that his facial

hair may be trying to communicate with him,

an idealistic slacktivist undergoes a surreal metamorphosis in an alternate future Toronto.

MARCH 1, 2017Progress! We're "remixing" issue one of The Beard before moving on to issue two. Check out Ryan's wonderful new colours below

We're almost there. Thanks for joining us for the ride so far. Ryan's hard at work inking the final five pages and we'll have the first issue completed before the end of the year. I'll be updating Chapter Four with meta content later in the week. In the meantime, try not to eat your friends.

​BUT: despite setbacks and really kinda sorta vital time diversions, Chapter Two is HERE(and over there on the right). In order to keep the story coming, we're now going to try doing "version updates" of the comic in progress.

​Version one will be in black and white with limited meta content (but still some - keep hunting!). When it's ready - hopefully between B&W chapters - we'll add an update with colour and other extras for version two. For now, enjoy Ryan's excellent inks.